2/5
Charlotte Kirk faces demons fictional and all-too-real in this torrid tale of a persecuted woman, but the script is decidedly magic-free
15 April 2021 • 12:18pm
Charlotte Kirk stands up for herself as the tormented Grace in Neil Marshall s new film
Credit: Handout
Dir: Neil Marshall. Cast: Charlotte Kirk, Steven Waddington, Sean Pertwee, Joe Anderson, Emma Campbell-Jones. 15 cert, 111 mins
As the closing captions of The Reckoning reveal, the last woman to be executed for witchcraft in the British Isles was Janet Horne, who was convicted in 1727 on the hearsay of her neighbours, stripped, tarred and burned alive. She’s mentioned here as a footnote to lend this bloody thriller, set during the Great Plague of 1665–6, some ballast – an aspect in which it’s otherwise found wanting.
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Movie theaters are slowly reopening, but most of the new releases are headed to streaming services rather than the big screen. Whether you're staying at
The British witch hunt thriller “The Reckoning” is a well-meaning, but consistently staid horror movie about institutionalized misogyny, and the women who have to survive it. Set in 1665, which an opening credit tells us is the “year of the great plague,” “The Reckoning” follows Grace Haverstock (Charlotte Kirk, who co-wrote the movie with director Neil Marshall), a newly widowed mother who is accused, imprisoned, and tortured for imaginary crimes of witchcraft.
Grace’s accusers are all vicious humanoid cardboard cut-outs, and her trials are all obviously gross without ever being enlightening or varied enough to also be relentless. I’m often an apologist for this sort of neo-grindhouse genre exercise, whose tired horror-fantasy tropes over-stress the cyclical nature of real world injustice, but “The Reckoning” isn’t mean or uplifting enough to warrant much of a defense.